I’m going to go on an after-dark rant because I’m shocked and yet not even a little bit, by the ‘othering’ of children becoming blatant as more educators start to feel the pressure of keeping our community safe.

Keeping our community safe is, as public servants, our current number one objective. And as teachers and schools, we have never had to do quite so much with such ineffectual, undermining and ever-morphing structures underneath us.

To then take the one demographic who will most likely be denied any real choice in how they publicly deal with this pandemic

and slate them

is quite frankly appalling and one hundred percent a deal breaker.

Children are not ‘children’.
Children are a stage in human life that happens to, completely agnostically, be at an earlier developmental stage than your ‘adulthood’.

We are the same. One person. At different points in time.

Like a tree that starts at seed and grows into a grand oak, and judges not its sapling stage for needing more; so it is with us.

Except that ‘adults’ not having learnt what to do with feelings & fears, control/reject those that threaten who they think they ‘should’ be.

Children, in the current mainstream discourse (I generalise), are no good unless controlled, policed, and ‘disciplined’- because guess what?

To allow them to be any other, would be to admit that we ourselves are wild, flawed, damaged and outside of any control.

And so in fear of ourselves - we’re resorting to a public tearing down of ‘those children’, who will tear, punch, kick and spit;
‘those children’ who are bound by the rules of fear, and silent corridors and a lack of space to be...

...where the purported ‘saviours’ of our children from themselves
emerge to split them into ‘them’ and us to ‘us’; because wild children, what are they even like?

So news flash then: They’re YOU.
YOU.

Our children are you are us are everyone

And god knows we’ve lived in darkness for so long that enough children are being brought up to live in more and more fear.

But YOU signed up to bring them a better deal at life. So step up and do your own emotional housekeeping, so that you aren’t responsible for more fear.

So that you aren’t responsible for perpetuating yet another cycle of an elaborate fear of ourselves - messy, vulnerable, fragile, untamed and strange as we are.

If the medical profession has an oath to keep their charges safe - so should we. To keep our children safe from us.

Go do your own work, so that you aren’t projecting your traumas on to those who have theirs already, and need more from you. Deal with your fears. Deal with you.

Deal with your fears so that you can make room to feel other things. Like compassion and empathy for everything that you went through, so that you let our children, too.

& perhaps we’ll finally make decisions about safety from a place of being secure.
We owe our children that.